Monday, August 17, 2009

BlindSearch

The recent Yahoo-Microsoft search deal inspired the BlindSearch search engine comparator. Michael Kordahi, the creator of this cool site, posted the results of his experiment here. In short the results till Aug 10 2009 are as follows:

Query count: 559,239
Results: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%

I decided to take this out for a spin myself and see if my experience was in line with the above. Here are the searches I tried:

  1. digital camera deals
  2. offline word list unix
  3. java 1.6 docs
  4. cheap new york hotels
  5. jquery docs
  6. words beginning with Q in english

Google returned me the best results for all but the last query. Yahoo was better with "words beginning with Q in english".

Now, to be fair I think the phrases above might not be what most others search for as is evident from the list of top searches on the site, but hey this was my test drive to see what I would get. I think I agree that a single company's search hegemony is not such a great idea for the web in general, but I think I'll stick with Google search till someone proves to me that their search is superior to Google's.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

My experiments with twitter - I

As with most other "social-networky" things I was hesitant to use twitter, although I had signed up a while ago. I guess I am a tad (my wife would say very) paranoid when it comes to my online presence. Be that as it may, it's been almost a week since I have started tweeting regularly and I think I really enjoy it. I lack the discipline and patience required for posting full blown blogs - a quick look on the right at my blog's archives will tell you as much. The short 140 character messages seem ideal for the indolent scribe in me.

But that's not what this post is about. I meant to share my experience using the awesome twitter client I am currently using. I had experimented with other twitter clients in the past but none of them seemed as capable as this one. So what was I looking for? I was looking for at least the following things:
1. Ability to group the people I follow into separate lists
2. Ability to synch up this structure on multiple clients
3. Clean uncluttered display

I was almost about to start writing my own little twitter app that I would run in an embedded jetty instance on my box at work and at home, but then I stumbled across TweetDeck. And boy, was I pleased! Not only did it satisfy my requirements, it threw in a slick polished UI as a bonus. Since I use my iPhone prodigiously as well, I was really overjoyed when I found that TweetDeck had a client for the iPhone too that looked and behaved almost exactly like the desktop version. I'll not lengthen this post by walking you through all the details about TweetDeck - others more accomplished than myself have done that already.

Here's to a lot of time whiled away tweeting happily...

Monday, August 10, 2009

Twitter

I had a mostly dormant twitter account for a while. My tweets were few and far in between as was the frequency at which I read tweets from people that I follow. But all that's about to change. Twitter, here I come!


Follow me on twitter.